English

Heading-error-free optical atomic magnetometry in the Earth-field range

Atomic Physics 2023-04-14 v1

Abstract

Alkali-metal atomic magnetometry is widely used due to its high sensitivity and cryogen-free operation. However, when operating in geomagnetic field, it suffers from heading errors originating from nonlinear Zeeman (NLZ) splittings and magnetic resonance asymmetries, which lead to difficulties in mobile-platform measurements. We demonstrate an alignment based 87^{87}Rb magnetometer, which, with only a single magnetic resonance peak and well-separated hyperfine transition frequencies, is insensitive or even immune to NLZ-related heading errors. It is shown that the magnetometer can be implemented for practical measurements in the geomagnetic environments and the photon-shot-noise-limited sensitivity reaches 9fT/Hz9\,{\rm{fT}}/\sqrt{\rm{Hz}} at room temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.05071,
  title  = {Heading-error-free optical atomic magnetometry in the Earth-field range},
  author = {Rui Zhang and Dimitra Kanta and Arne Wickenbrock and Hong Guo and Dmitry Budker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.05071},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:44:25.916Z